Strange spacing and letters bugs in Word X

[Jean-Jacques Marluff]

Hi,

I'm experiencing a strange bug in Word X. I'm on an iMac G4 with OS X
10.3.9 and Word X SR 1.

On some documents (from various sources, not always the same one), the
spacing of the letters is odd, and sometimes there's a big space in the
middle of a word. When I try to delete it, a few letters disappear as
well. When I select a part of a word to delete it, another part
disappears.

I tried to change the font from Times to Arial, and this problem
disappeared (but reappeared when I switched back to Times). Then, I
changed the font to Arial again, saved the document with a different
name, closed Word, reopened the doc, switched the font to Times again,
and the bug was gone. However, it keeps reappearing sometimes with a
document or another.

Has anyone experienced the same bug ? Is there a way to fix it for good
?

 

[Jean-Jacques Marluff]

Hi,

I'm experiencing a strange bug in Word X. I'm on an iMac G4 with OS X
10.3.9 and Word X SR 1.

On some documents (from various sources, not always the same one), the
spacing of the letters is odd, and sometimes there's a big space in the
middle of a word. When I try to delete it, a few letters disappear as
well. When I select a part of a word to delete it, another part
disappears.

I tried to change the font from Times to Arial, and this problem
disappeared (but reappeared when I switched back to Times). Then, I
changed the font to Arial again, saved the document with a different
name, closed Word, reopened the doc, switched the font to Times again,
and the bug was gone. However, it keeps reappearing sometimes with a
document or another.

Has anyone experienced the same bug ? Is there a way to fix it for good
?

Yes. That was a very famous bug in the early days of OS X and Word v.X
However, it should have gone away long before the versions of OS X and
v.X that you have. Your v.X seems to be the completely up-to-date
version. Just to check, mine says 10.1.6 in the finder and in the about
Word panel says yadda yadda "Service Release 1"

Does the document print correctly? What happens if you use page view
and change the zoom level ever so slightly? Try setting the zoom to
page width then dragging the bottom right corner as a neat way of
jogging the zoom factor.

If I were faced with this problem again, I'd clean up my fonts in font
book[1], clean out the font caches and possibly follow the corrupt
normal and corrupt document magic on the mvp's site.

Another thing you might try is changing the state of the quartz
smoothing in Word's preferences » general.

1. Oops! Font Book was rubbish in 10.3.9. It might be a bit more work
to rid yourself of problem / duplicate fonts by hand.

Thanks for your help Elliott. Just one thing : what is the mvp's
website ?